A Children’s Book I Can’t Read Without Crying

The only problem with Lillian’s Right to Vote, a children’s book by Jonah Winter and Shane W. Evans, is that I can’t get through it without tearing up. It’s a powerful story about an old woman who exercises her hard-won right to vote.

On her way to vote, Lillian recalls the discrimination her ancestors faced because of the color of their skin, including slavery, mob violence, and post-emancipation prohibitions on full participation in civic life. She also thinks about the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which states that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged… on account of race,” and then the ratification fifty years later of the Nineteenth, which guarantees women the same right. Then, she recalls the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which addresses voting discrimination. That law makes the right to vote a reality for her.

She steps into the voting booth and pulls the lever.

By this point, I’m shedding tears of joy, and my daughters are cheering. Then, we turn the page to the Author’s Note, which reminds us that the right to vote still needs protection:

The sad coda to this story is that in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating federal oversight of states’ election processes.

That case was Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013), which invalidated the portion of the Voting Rights Act that determined which states and counties were required to seek preclearance from the federal government of their voting laws before those laws went into effect. As you can probably guess, most of those jurisdictions were in the South, places that maintained devices that were designed to prevent African Americans from voting (like literacy and knowledge tests).

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts claimed:

Nearly 50 years [after passage of the Voting Rights Act], things have changed dramatically… In the covered jurisdictions, voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels…. There is no doubt that these improvements are in large part because of the Voting Rights Act. (internal citations omitted).

Despite this success, the Court struck down the most effective provision of the Act, stating that the formula for determining which jurisdictions required preclearance no longer reflected current conditions. The majority briefly noted that “voting discrimination still exists,” but as Justice Ginsburg noted in the dissent, “the Court today terminates the remedy that proved to be best suited to block that discrimination.” While other provisions of the Voting Rights Act remain intact, the Shelby decision greatly hampered the federal government’s ability to eradicate voting discrimination.

However, with Justice Scalia’s death last Saturday, there may be more hope for democracy. Scalia sided with the majority in Shelby, and is responsible for reprehensible decisions in several other civil rights cases, including the plurality decision in Vieth v. Jubelier, 541 U.S. 267 (2004), which affirmed a lower court decision that said that politically gerrymandered voting districts — oddly shaped districts that often dilute the votes of minorities — do not violate the Constitution. In Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, had it not been for Justice Kennedy’s swing vote, then Justice Scalia’s dissent would have prevailed, making it virtually impossible to challenge gerrymandering at all.

A Stanford professor wrote an op-ed on Scalia in our local paper. And since I have it right here with me I’ll quote a few of his words: “his mode of interpretation almost invariably harmed the most vulnerable who came to the court seeking redress for their claims.”

I’m not shy about saying how happy I was to hear of his death. Scalia’s decisions hurt millions and threaten our democracy. I also didn’t think he had both oars in the water, especially when it came to his thoughts on religion, which undoubtedly influenced his legal decisions and shouldn’t have.

He has been quoted as saying things that make me shudder. Here’s one: “The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.” ”

And this one: “I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion… We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists to impose it on all of us through the Constitution.”

Or this: “You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My god! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the devil! Most of mankind has believed in the devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the devil.”

And this man was making decisions that affected the course of our lives. Yikes!